


A Warm Place to Rise

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, M/M, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 08:50:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12527560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: The problem is, Steve can cook. He can bake. It was always just him and his ma, growing up, and so she’d teach him how to peel the potatoes and skin the carrots and boil the bones for broth, how to make bread and knead it and tuck it away. The kitchen’s never been a mystery to Steve.But Bucky.Bucky.





	A Warm Place to Rise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mambo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mambo/gifts).



Bucky moves in with Steve a month before Sarah Rogers dies—a month before she goes into the hospital, a month Steve’s artwork and floor sweeping and secretarial skills are barely enough to not quite make the several months of missed rent. Bucky moves in and the apartment stays more or less the same, only with more dirty laundry on the floor and fewer clean dishes than Sarah Rogers ever would have allowed.

Steve donates most of his ma's clothes to the other women in the building, gives the stockings and curlers to Bertha down the hall, the dresses to Mrs. Feinstein for her oldest daughter, tosses the underwear and blushes through it all.

He keeps her Bible, her book of poems that she tucked in her jacket and carried all the way from Ireland, her strange collection of mismatched silver spoons and her far more useful sewing kit. He tries to give the book away, but Bucky comes home to find it on the stoop and carries it right back inside.

“What are you doing, throwing this out?” Bucky cries, waving the damnable, dusty thing in Steve’s face. Steve sneezes. “We’re gonna use this!”

Steve sneezes three more times and throws his dirty handkerchief at Bucky when he’s done. Mrs. Duncan gave that book to Sarah in return for some mending back in 1928, and Bucky’s enthusiasm has dislodged a decade of dust and one unhappy spider.

Steve’s pretty sure he’s got more reason to be unhappy than the spider. “We are _not_ gonna use it,” he shoots back, folding his arms and trying to glare at Bucky from watering eyes. Damn dust. Damn book. “Ma never used it. Mrs. Duncan never used it. It sat on our front porch for three hours today because nobody needs a book on how to make French pastries!”

“I’m gonna learn,” Bucky says stubbornly. “They’ll be just like your mom’s,” he promises, never mind that Sarah Rogers never baked a pastry of any sort in her life.

The book goes back on the shelf, and the next day Bucky comes home from work with five pounds of flour and three different kinds of sugar because he couldn’t figure out why they’d sell so many but Sally said they were all important.

Sally had also sold Bucky some special “pastry molds.” Steve admires Sally’s ingenuity in making a sale, but he’s going to clobber her with the molds and the two pounds of confectioner’s sugar he now owns as soon as he gets a chance.

The problem is, Steve can cook. He can bake. It was always just him and his ma, growing up, and he’d be by the stove with the pot of water boiling for steam and _bored_ , and so she’d teach him how to peel the potatoes and skin the carrots and boil the bones for broth, how to make bread and knead it and tuck it away to rise. The kitchen’s never been a mystery to Steve.

But Bucky.

 _Bucky_.

“Get out from underfoot,” Mrs. Barnes would tell Bucky, when he tried to peer into the oven and make her bread fall, nudging him out of the way with her hip while she stirred the soup with one hand and fed baby Lizzie applesauce with the other. “Go on, go outside and play. I’ll call when supper’s done.”

“Go help your father,” Mrs. Barnes would say, when Bucky wandered over to where Becky was washing dishes and their mother was rolling out crust for a pie with half an eye on Lizzie and Nonie playing with pots on the floor. “Your sister will help me with the pie.”

Bucky has never baked a loaf of bread in his life, looks into the oven as though he expects to put in dough and pull out a lump of gold.

 _Well_ , Steve thinks, shoving open the window to clear the smoke out of the kitchen and letting in a flurry of snow, _he does put in dough, and pull out lumps_.

Bucky’s good at lots of things. Math. Baseball. Dancing. Sweet talking Mrs. Feinstein when she suspects he’s set their building on fire. He can measure out all the ingredients to the last grain of salt, but he forgets to keep the butter cold and he kneads the dough too long and he doesn’t flatten his palms and curl his fingers over it the way Sarah Rogers had taught her son, back when her hands could cup his whole face and his own hands were frustratingly small.

“You need an assistant,” Steve declares in self-defense, and moves the bowl of butter farther away from the stove. He learns how to make crepes, which taste like blintzes, and croissants, which Bucky carries upstairs to Mrs. Feinstein with a grandiose bow.

“I made these!” he announces, waving the steaming tray of mostly unburnt croissants in her face. “Try one!”

Mrs. Feinstein has seen and smelled the smoke billowing out of the Rogers-Barnes kitchen, and understandably squints suspiciously at the rather decent looking French pastry in Bucky’s hand.

“Steve helped,” Bucky admits, when Steve elbows him. “His mom taught him how.”

“Ah.” Mrs. Feinstein smiles at Bucky, and manages to look unsurprised that her neighbor Sarah Rogers, an Irish nurse working long hours with a sickly son, also used to bake French pastries in her spare time. Then she winks at Steve, and takes a croissant.

 * * *

“You’re French!” Bucky grabs Jackie by the shoulders and shakes him excitedly, once they’re back in the bunker in London and faced with a working stove. Steve may be a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, but he’s still Steve Rogers, and he hears Bucky say “French” and groans. “I’ll make mille-feuille!” Bucky pronounces it “milly-fyully” (so did Steve, to be fair, until he’d become Captain America and had to learn how to eat at Senator Brandt's table), so it’s no wonder Jackie doesn’t know what he means.

Bucky gets distracted calculating the thickness of pastry layers and falls asleep by the stove like Steve used to do as a child, but Steve stays awake all night working with the rations they have to get it right. He rolls the dough out and folds it, wraps large, unfamiliar hands around the rolling pin. He dips his hands into the bag and the flour feels the way it has since he was young, cool and powdery and insubstantial around his child’s fingers as he threw it onto the table to make it ready to roll out the dough.

“Voila!” Bucky announces, carrying the somewhat lopsided French dessert into the cafeteria first thing in the morning and unintentionally answering Col. Phillips’ question about “where all the fucking sugar went?” “Look what I made!”

“You made this?” Dernier wonders, staring skeptically at the mille-feuille and at Bucky, who still has soot from the kitchen floor on his cheek.

“Well,” Bucky admits grudgingly, when Steve elbows him in the ribs and nearly knocks them both over with the unexpected force of it, “Steve helped.”

The Commandos dive right in—Phillips drops a piece into his coffee, complaining about the waste of rations—and Bucky sucks the cream off his fingers and leers at Steve.

“Did they teach you how to make desserts in boot camp?” Falsworth wonders, the only Commando bothering with a fork.

“Nah,” Bucky says, slings one arm up and over Steve’s shoulders, makes Steve crouch over when he pulls him close. Steve brushes the soot off Bucky’s cheek with one finger, could reach out and cup Bucky’s whole face with his hands. “There was a book.”

“Bucky makes them just like my ma,” Steve says. He winks at Falsworth. Then he wraps his floury hand around Bucky’s waist, pops the last bite of mille-feuille into his mouth, and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> So whtaft asked for "prewar" (it snuck in there, sorry!), and I haven't written S/B in a dog's age and had _no ideas_. And went back and read through my old prewar ficlets and...nothing. And then I baked cookies, and this came to mind. I'm sure it's filled with historical inaccuracies, but it's written in good faith and good fun! And thank you so much for donating to ConPRmetidos!


End file.
